Theoretically, almost any app can be ported

When Google first announced Chrome OS in 2009, among the few people who were polite enough to not dismiss it outright, and predict for it either a stillbirth or an early demise, were those who saw a merger with Android as its ultimate fate. Of course, let alone a full-blown merger, we have yet to see substantial interplay between the two platforms. The best we have seen, all these years down the line, is the ability to run a grand total of four Android apps on Chrome OS — and that too is a very recent development. Even now, Google is only working with “a select group of Android developers” and is unlikely to bring more than a handful of mobile apps to Chrome OS in the near future. Well, that’s what hacks are for, right?

Mozilla touts the gaming potential of its JavaScript-based answer to Google’s NaCL at GDC

Browser makers are notorious for taking disproportionately great pride in even the slightest of improvements in JavaScript performance. But when it comes to Mozilla Firefox’s ASM.js optimization module OdinMonkey most of the hype seems justified. On Wednesday, the non-profit outfit, which claims that its ASM.js implementation can deliver Javascript performance that’s only about twice as slow as native code, used its GDC session to showcase a web-based version of Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 that relies on ASM.js.

Browser plugins have had a huge say in our Web browsing experience over the past many years but now their existence and prevalence is what’s preventing us from experiencing the Web in the best way possible across our many Internet-enabled devices. The good news is that not only are plugins dispensable but they are on their way out. However, don’t expect them to vanish overnight. As opposed to a sudden and spectacular knockout punch, they are more likely to fall to a succession of small blows like the one Google just delivered in the form of the latest Chrome Beta.

Its many detractors think it is regressive, but Google is pretty sure of Native Client (NaCl), a technology that allows Chrome to run native compiled code across different OSes, being “the ideal way of putting rich content and game engines in the browser.” To prove its point, Google hosted a special event at its Mountain View headquarters on December 8.